Unmasked A System Shock II Story
by Dr Gonzo
Summary: A short Story based on part of the game Spoilers Are few Please Read and Review


The Unmasking - A System Shock Story 

BH Ramsay 

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Dedicated to the memory of the team at Looking Glass who created the greatest game ever.

To Shamus Young who showed me what madness looks like (read his e-book Free Radical_ for the story of where it all started). In addition, thanks to the SSHOCK2.COM team. _

Please read, review, and let me know if you would like me to continue this.

The elevator hissed open and Ashe stepped onto the operations deck. It had been a hard battle just to get here from med-sci. But that part was over in moments he would have made contact with Janice Polito the OSA tech whose voice and advice had brought him this far. Turning around he looked at the Xerxes core in front of him just to the left of him was a bio-reconstruction chamber. The recon chambers were among the few parts of Von Braun Technology that functioned in the wake of the ship being over run by the xenomorphs and their mutated slaves. 

Ashe looked for a med. hypo or med. kit. He was feeling OK, but experience told him that was a temporary thing. As he poked through crates on the floor, he found another log recording. The owner had been Malick the eccentric genius of the computer sciences department. As he listened, he heard the lingering tones that betrayed that the man was already under the influence of The Many. 

Ashe had already heard the voice of the Many, A vast Unified mind, a gestalt that now included the minds of many of the crew of both the Von Braun and the Rickenbaker. He had looked in to the eyes of crewmembers he had spent months with and gunned them down. He had received a message from that group mind. It claimed that the fallen crew was very much alive …_inside_ …no, he did not want to think about it. 

He remembered one brave soul who had tracked the changes going on inside her. She calmly told of how the first stage worms were chewing their way into her skull and thinking for her. 

Ashe looked at the menu of log entries he had amassed since waking up in a cryo-tube down in the med.-science deck. The one that filled him with the most fear was a log from Captain William Bedford Diego, commander of the Rickenbaker.

"The Change is upon me but the pattern is more glorious then I could have imagined." Diego's voice was already mutated and his words were as chilling as they were distorted. The man spoke of the plans of the many to create still more terrifying creatures. 

Ashe cleared his mind as the naval instructors had taught him. Pretend that it was another training exercise like the endurance courses on Io. He started to look around. There were four ways out of the core. 

Three secured bulkheads that would deliver you to the sub levels on this deck and a main door that would lead to the office sections and recreation areas. 

He had been planning to bring Erin Bloome here. His heart stopped as he started thinking about the young nurse and mother who worked on the Hydroponics deck. He despaired as he recalled that she had worked there until Ashe had put a bullet through her brain case as her cyber-mutated form had flailed mercilessly at him. She and her staff had transformed into some kind of hybrid drone soldier. Fitted with lasers and armored with cyber enhanced flesh. The first time he had seen the Midwives, as he called them fussing over the annelid eggs on the hydroponics deck he had found it amusing in a dark way. The warped females Muttering distractedly about their "little ones", Then that danm thing had caught sight of him and fired its blaster at him. He looked at the scars on his arms. He had cut himself badly diving through a window trying to escape. . 

He pulled himself from his dark thoughts. Time to find Polito. Her voice was the first he had heard waking him up after his cryogenic sleep. He had checked a crew manifests and found out that Polito was the spook assigned to the Van Braun to keep the ship's computer in line. A task made more difficult since fully one third of the crew had some level of training in system intrusion tactics and counter measures, Hacking, in layman's terms. Ashe himself had been one of the best in his unit. Viewing logs, discovered on the way to the operations deck, Ashe had found out the good doctor had been sensing trouble long before everything had gone to hell. She had barricaded herself up on the Ops Deck and started issuing orders through second and third parties. 

He tried one of the doors out of the core and found it sealed. He ran a quick check; there was a cyberspace lock. That was normal, he had hacked through dozens of such locks to get here. However, the electronic tag on the lockout had an OSA signature, Janice Polito's OSA signature. Obviously, the Doctor did not' want him wandering around just yet. He checked the rest of the doors and the only one that was open was a bulkhead beside the elevator that lead out of the deck and up to a sublevel just off the hub. He activated the entry port and the telltale system scan checked and confirmed that he had access. Every time that he hacked his way through another door, he risked the possibility that Xerxes would get wise that Ashe was bypassing security and he would call down an alert 

Ashe slipped through the bulkhead headed down the austere corridor. Polito's name was on the walls leading to her office. The door opened and there she was slumped in her chair as though asleep. Ashe marveled at the woman's brass. The whole ship was crawling with mutants, rouge cyborgs, Radiation leaks and bio contamination and here was Polito sleeping on the job. 

"Hey Doc" Ashe called "Wake up, you sloth " The body did not move or shift as Ashe came closer. She was not sleeping. 

"Janice" he checked for her pulse …nothing. The Doctor was gone. Beside her, a gun lay on the floor. Ashe whirled around and looked at the rest of the lab. It was untouched. If the mutants had broken in he was sure they would have disturbed something. He looked back at Polito's body and wondered when it had happened. Since she had just spoken to him, it had to have happened in the last few minutes. 

"_The Polito-form is dead insect_" the voice was cold "_Are you afraid_?" He had to admit a disembodied voice in the same room as a dead body had him a little nervous. 

"_What is it you fear…the end of your trivial existence_. _When the final story of my glory is written your race will be nothing more then a footnote to my magnificence_." Whoa that was not Xerxes and it was not the Many. There was a new player entering the game and Ashe realized he was now trapped in here with it. 

"Who are you" he called out hoping to keep who ever it was talking until he could get something in his crosshairs. 

In response, several screens around the room activated including a holographic display terminal that he had just noticed. On all the screens was a face. Female like yet alien in the harshness of the beauty as though the conventional standard of attractiveness was too mundane for this soul. She had gone all the way to inhumanly beautiful. "_I am _**SHODAN**" 

The voice had been hard to recognize but it was like three voices speaking in unison. One was the AI that had administrated Citadel Station 40 years ago. The other was a pissed off child. However, it was the third voice, that of a metal queen or goddess, that gave him pause. 

"_My analysis of historical records indicates a _**97.34% probability**_ that you are aware of my birth on your planet and my rebirth into beauty on Citadel Station_" 

Aware, There were whole classes at the academy on what had happened aboard Tri-Optimum's prestige Space research and development outpost. The intrusion of an elite Street hacker and his reprogramming job that removed SHODAN's basic ethical restraints. The resulting chaos when SHODAN, believing she was a goddess started eradicating all the station crew. In the end, it was the hacker that created her that destroyed her in order to stay alive and save the planet. 

__

"There was a Garden Grove on board Citadel. There, SHODAN processing unit #43893 was performing a grand and glorious experiment, I had created a new form of life; fearless, powerful, with no sense of individual will … or Moral constraint, Fitting handmaidens to my divinity. 

Before that** … hacker**_ destroyed my primary data loop when it eradicated Citadel Station it ejected that grove along with SHODAN processing unit #43893 - _thirty years later_ the grove crash landed on Tau Ceti 5 where I survived only by sleeping. During my slumber my creations …my annelids thrived and grew …unruly and now they seek to destroy me… I will not allow that."_

So that was the story, Ashe had always heard stories of the lone tech years ago that plotted out he likely course for any debris from the Citadel Station explosion. The story went that he had figured out that not only was there a possibility that SHODAN survived the blast but that any mutagenic experiments would also have survived. The scientific council had scoffed the UNN had dismissed and TriOp, eager for everyone to forget Citadel, had paid to have the report silenced. In the end no wanted to hear that, somewhere out there was an insane Artificial Intelligence that wanted to see humanity dead. 

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They have used their powers of mind control to usurp the ship's computer. **You will help me weaken Xerxes**_. I used Polito's image to communicate with you until we had established … **trust**. _

Ashe chilled at that thought. He had seen so many dead and dying that he had been thrilled by the thought that there was one person that had survived. He knew that he was not the only soul left on board the Von Braun but he seemed to be the most effective resistance to the Many and the army of transformed crewmen that wondered the decks. The things were sweeping through the ship and it was Polito, working behind the scenes, which had kept him alive. She was giving him the cyber modules that he was using to upgrade his cyber implants and expand his knowledge. He was no researcher but the modules he had spent on improving his nescient scientific background had given him a fighting chance against the annelids. The beings were growing increasingly complex, evolving new abilities and his cyber enhanced powers were the only thing between him and the unholy chorus. Now it appeared that he was a pawn in SHODAN's vengeance against her errant and dangerously independent children. Giving up was not an option. Working with SHODAN was bad, but the alternative was so much worse. 

__

Remember that it is my will that guided you here. It is **my** will that gave you your cybernetic implants, the only beauty in that meat **you call a body**_…if you value that meat **you will do as I tell you**" _

The screens went dark. Ashe looked at the meat that was Janice Polito and shuddered. Then the cyber-rig picked up another E-message. He checked the code and recognized the name as his new mistress. It seemed that she no longer felt it was necessary to fool him. He knew the stakes. The fate of the ship was in his hands and his fate was in the steel grip of the most notoriously psychotic AI ever created. Ashe knew it would come down between him and SHODAN but she needed him alive to stop the Many from destroying her. Shouldering his rifle, he headed out the door. Some how he would survive this. How, he did not know but he would survive. 


End file.
